Waiting for Wednesday

you,
hasn’t he? You made him look bad, and he can’t bear that and he won’t
ever forget it. No wonder he’s had such a smirk on his face recently.’
    ‘Are you saying he set the whole thing
up just to get at me?’
    ‘He’s capable of it. If I had my
way, I’d never have to listen to his drivel about the art of crime again.
Unfortunately, the commissioner is a fan.’ He hesitated, then added:
‘Perhaps I shouldn’t tell you this, but I’m going to anyway. At thebeginning of the Lennox inquiry, I told the commissioner that I
didn’t want us to use Bradshaw any more. I thought I was making an informal
suggestion, but Crawford hauled Bradshaw in and made me repeat what I’d said in
front of him. There’s nothing he loves more than playing one person off against
another.’
    ‘What’s this got to do with
me?’
    ‘Bradshaw started slagging you off so
I defended you and said he was jealous of you because you’d made him look stupid.
It’s probably my fault for taunting him. I wish there was something I could
do.’
    ‘There isn’t. And if you think
of something, please don’t do it.’
    ‘I’m not going to have him
getting his hands on the Lennox children, though.’
    ‘Are you going to tell
them?’
    ‘Yes. Although perhaps their dad will
do it for me. Poor kids. First their mother gets murdered, and then their whole past
gets demolished. You know the son already, don’t you?’
    ‘I’ve met him. Why are you
looking at me like that?’
    ‘I’ve got a
proposition.’
    ‘The answer’s no.’
    It was Riley who discovered all the
bottles. They were in the small shed in the garden, which was full of the tiny
lawnmower, spades, rakes, secateurs, a large ripped tarpaulin, a wheelbarrow, a stack of
empty plastic flowerpots, old jam jars, a box of bathroom tiles. Somebody had wanted
them to remain hidden, for they were pushed into a corner behind the half-used tins of
paint and had been carefully covered with a dust sheet. He looked at them for a while,
then went to get Yvette.
    Yvette pulled them out one by one and
inspected them.Vodka, white cider, cheap whisky: alcohol to get drunk
on, not to give pleasure. Were they the children’s or the parents’, old
bottles or recent? They looked new. They looked secret.



TWENTY-SIX
    Karlsson needed to find an appropriate adult.
Often an appropriate adult for a juvenile is a parent, but in the case of the Lennox
children, one of their parents was dead and the other was not at all appropriate in the
circumstances. He thought about asking Louise Weller, Ruth’s sister, to be present
instead – but Judith Lennox said that she would prefer to
die
than talk about
her mother in front of her aunt, and Ted had muttered about Louise getting off on the
whole thing.
    ‘She can’t keep away,’ he
said. ‘We don’t want her or her cakes or her religion. Or her bloody
baby.’
    So the appropriate adult was a woman
nominated by Social Services, who turned up at the police station prompt and eager. She
was in her early sixties, thin as a bird, bright-eyed and glittering with nervous
excitement. It turned out that this was her first interview ever. She’d done the
training, of course, she’d read everything she could lay her hands on and, what
was more, she prided herself on her gift for getting on well with young people.
Teenagers were so frequently misunderstood, weren’t they? Often, all they needed
was someone to listen to them and be on their side, which was why she was here. She
smiled, her cheeks slightly flushed.
    ‘Very well,’ said Karlsson,
doubtfully. ‘You understand that we will conduct three interviews, one after the
other, with each of the Lennox children. The eldest, Ted, isn’t strictly juvenile
– he’s just eighteen. As you know, you’re simply there to make sure
they’re properly treated, and if you feel they need anything, you should say
so.’
    ‘Such a painful and difficult
age,’ said Amanda Thorne. ‘Half child and half adult.’
    ‘I’ll conduct the interviews,
and my colleague, Dr Frieda Klein, will also be present.’
    When he had told Yvette that he was taking
Frieda to talk to Ted, Judith and Dora, not her, she had stared at him with such a
reproachful expression that he had almost changed his mind. He could deal with her
anger, not her distress. Her cheeks burned and she mumbled that it was fine, perfectly
all right, it was up to him and she understood.
    Ted was first. He shuffled into the room,
laces trailing,